{"slug": "microsoft-s-satya-nadella-takes-a-veiled-swipe-at-anthropic-and-other-ai-model", "title": "Microsoft's Satya Nadella takes a veiled swipe at Anthropic and other AI model makers", "summary": "Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella criticized AI labs like Anthropic for complaining about model distillation while benefiting from training on public data. He argued that restricting distillation is hypocritical and that companies should own their AI infrastructure rather than rely on single model vendors. Nadella's comments come amid ongoing disputes over data scraping and distillation practices in the AI industry.", "body_md": "Satya Nadella took a quiet [swipe at AI labs](https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-giants-learn-hard-truth-modern-internet-anthropic-openai-google-2026-7) like Anthropic for how they train their models.\n\nIn an X post on Sunday, the Microsoft CEO said that model makers [complaining about distillation](https://www.businessinsider.com/distillation-problem-ai-industry-anthropic-openai-2026-7) is hypocritical. Distillation is the process of training a less powerful model based on the outputs of a stronger one.\n\n\"While the great innovation that comes from model providers having fair use rights to train models on public data is needed, I find it ironic that the status quo is to then turn around and impose restrictive terms on distillation, and to reserve the right to learn from customer usage and interaction data,\" Nadella wrote.\n\nHe added that if learning only flows in one direction, owners of the learning infrastructure make all the money while creators of the knowledge get left out.\n\nFrontier AI model makers like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind rely on work created by others to train their own models. ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini acquire their \"intelligence\" from publicly available writing, images, and other data. Numerous companies and individuals have sued the leading AI labs over [nonconsensual content \"scraping.](https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-web-bots-crawling-referrals-cloudflare-distillation-2026-7)\"\n\nThough the lab was not named, Nadella's comments seemed especially targeted toward Anthropic. Earlier this year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei complained that Chinese model makers are stealing his company's work, using Claude to train their own models.\n\nLast month, Anthropic wrote a letter to South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren saying that Alibaba had recently carried out \"the [largest known distillation attack](https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-china-alibaba-exploiting-ai-models-distillation-attack-2026-6)\" on it to date.\n\n\"Competitors can use it to acquire powerful capabilities from other labs in a fraction of the time, and at a fraction of the cost, that it would take to develop them independently,\" Anthropic said in [a lengthy statement](https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-deepseek-distillation-minimax-moonshot-ai-2026-2) on the subject in February.\n\nAlibaba did not publicly respond to Anthropic's accusations at the time.\n\nIn Sunday's blog post, Nadella warned that companies relying on leading models are essentially handing over their proprietary data and then paying to use them.\n\nHe said companies should own their AI infrastructure and institutional knowledge rather than rely on any single model vendor. They should also conduct their own evaluations and their own \"learning loop,\" allowing their AI capabilities to improve continuously over time.\n\n\"That is why enterprises need a real trust boundary for their human capital and token capital to compound,\" he said. \"And it is a hard boundary across which nothing crosses, not even the intelligence exhaust, without consent.\"\n\nElon Musk has also criticized Anthropic for how it collects data and trains its models.\n\n\"Anthropic is guilty of stealing training data at massive scale and has had to pay multi-billion dollar settlements for their theft. This is just a fact,\" Musk wrote in a February X post, following Anthropic's complaint against Chinese models.\n\nAnthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/microsoft-s-satya-nadella-takes-a-veiled-swipe-at-anthropic-and-other-ai-model", "canonical_source": "https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-swipe-ai-model-makers-distillation-2026-7", "published_at": "2026-07-13 04:51:26+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-13 05:15:25.264886+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-policy", "ai-ethics", "ai-agents", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["Microsoft", "Satya Nadella", "Anthropic", "OpenAI", "Google DeepMind", "Dario Amodei", "Alibaba", "Elon Musk"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/microsoft-s-satya-nadella-takes-a-veiled-swipe-at-anthropic-and-other-ai-model", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/microsoft-s-satya-nadella-takes-a-veiled-swipe-at-anthropic-and-other-ai-model.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/microsoft-s-satya-nadella-takes-a-veiled-swipe-at-anthropic-and-other-ai-model.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/microsoft-s-satya-nadella-takes-a-veiled-swipe-at-anthropic-and-other-ai-model.jsonld"}}